Wii U Gamepad Has Almost No Latency, According To Ubisoft

For those who aren't engineers or huge nerds, latency is, essentially, the time delay between one system, such as a game controller, communicating information such as a button press to another system, namely your console.

That delay essentially limits how fast two systems can communicate with each other. Unless, apparently, those systems are the Wii U and its GamePad.

This doesn't come from Nintendo: This is according to Ubisoft's Michel Ancel, the creator of Rayman and Beyond Good And Evil. According to him, the Wii U and GamePad are blisteringly fast:

"It's crazy because the game is running in full HD [on the television], we are streaming another picture on the GamePad screen, and it's still 60 frames per second. And the latency on the controller is just 1/60 of a second, so it's one frame late. It's crazy, it's so fast. It's almost instant. That's why it responds so well. So it can be used as a real game-design thing."

Our Take: This sounds like a minor technical issue, but the near-zero latency means that essentially the touchscreen will react just like any other button on a controller. Ask anybody with a crappy connection on a multiplayer server: Even the slightest perceptible delay between your button press and the actual action can be agonizing.

We'll be curious to see how these claims hold up when games get frantic with lots of polygons on the screen, but needless to say, Ancel knows his stuff, and this endorsement is a good thing.